Theresa MacKnight has always had a healthy respect for nature. Her connection to it—and more specifically, to her home in New Brunswick’s Charlotte County—stems back to her time as a little girl, to spending time in the woods with her grandmother and learning to respect animals.
Naturally, in her many years of creating art, the world around her has been a great source of inspiration. MacKnight is known for her plein air painting technique, for capturing breathtaking scenery while out in the thick of it. But her latest collection, In the Place Where You Live, is a bold departure from that. It spawned after she set up trail cameras in her backyard during the early days of the pandemic. The resulting snapshots of wildlife, particularly ever-curious deer, compelled her to start this new series of paintings.
“The use of trail cameras and the collecting of images around rural properties is as common as collecting traditional family photographs,” says MacKnight. “I have always found the qualities of this type of photography to be very compelling and mysterious. I purchased a trail camera during the early days of the pandemic and set it up in my backyard in St. Andrews, curious to see the deer I knew were passing through at night.
“It became endlessly fascinating and exciting to rush out in the morning to see the inexact, accidental, and sometimes humorous results. They were like awkward family photos of individuals unaware or unconcerned about the presence of a camera.”
It didn’t hurt at all that the deer population of St. Andrews—which is estimated to be a healthy 22 deer per square kilometre or three to five times the amount regularly found in a community of that size—have been domesticating themselves for years. As MacKnight points out, the wildlife they call neighbours have continuously adapted, “regardless of our human intentions or wishes,” and it’s made for a curious quirk of her native Charlotte County that has inspired this series.
Though trail cameras are unable to capture colour photography, MacKnight sees this not as a limitation, but as a trove of opportunity—permission or invitation to invent, in her words. Rather than a starkly monochromatic night scene or even the phosphorescent green of night vision, MacKnight’s paintings pop with colour. She loves breaking the rules of colour and light in visual art and with this collection, she’s done it more than ever before.
MacKnight is known for her unique use of encaustics—an ancient technique involving beeswax—but she’s been enjoying using oils for this round of paintings, particularly bright fluorescents. The bright colours are a tool she uses to tell stories and create characters from these otherwise unassuming shots. It goes beyond balance, or a matter of highlights and tonal values, and into the realm of creative narrative. Colours that would never exist in the minuscule amount of light captured by the trail cam spring forth from the paintings, with the scenes being reinterpreted according to MacKnight’s fancy.
“One deer was curious, always coming up to the camera and sniffing and licking it,” says MacKnight. “So he was a golden colour. These two yearlings I saw them as little girls or feminine somehow, so they got pink. I use the colour as a way to give them character.”
The series has given MacKnight the opportunity to reflect on our relationship with nature as a society. Despite always having a healthy respect for nature, watching animals in such a methodical and creative way has had her thinking about the space we share, and how best to respect that.
“We do share a province with them. Humans can sometimes be annoyed by them—they eat our hostas, they can be dangerous. But they’re just doing what they’re wired to do, and they’re adapting and moving into our spaces,” says MacKnight. “They don’t have the same judgments as humans about borders and ideas of where things should be or go. They just go.
“As I was collecting these images and creating these paintings, one by one, I started to think that they might be coming from this quiet old connection. I felt comfortable with them. Spending time outdoors, at dark, in winter, also had an unexpected effect on my work. The colours changed, the light became invented, and I began to allow my imagination in.
“This changed everything.”
Below, MacKnight goes into detail about a few choice pieces from the In The Place Where You Live series.
Three Legs
“This is an example of a piece that was put together or invented. In the original photograph, there was only one deer, but the other two were placed. The easel in the image only has three legs, and the deer right beside it appears to only have three legs. There’s that sense of difference. Do the deer wonder why it’s there and why it only has three legs? Do they feel sorry for it?”
Purple Pride
“He had this glassy stare. I consider him somebody’s uncle, he’s gay, just out in the forest being himself and living his life. So that’s why he’s Purple Pride.”
Lucy
“Lucy is a white deer with a genetic anomaly called leucism. She’s a local deer who’s kind of iconic to me and the people that live here—always watching for her and wanting to see her. So I put her in that round, iconic shape. I hesitate to call it religious because that’s not what my work is about, but it does have that sort of overtone of religious renaissance paintings.”
Palettehead
“This one is a self-portrait, taken outside at night. I blurred out all the details except herself and the palette and paint. There are a lot of neon and fluorescent colours in the center. It’s personal—it’s about the energy I get from painting. It’s so simple to communicate through artwork instead of always through words. Paintings are better than any type of word.”
MacKnight’s work—and countless other talented Maritimes artists—can be seen at the Handworks Gallery, located at 12 King Street in Saint John, New Brunswick.